Welcome to the Pliny project homepage. The Pliny project aims
to promote some thinking that looks broadly at the provision of tools to
support scholarship. One of its products is a piece of software, also called
Pliny, which facilities note-taking and annotation -- a key element of
Humanities research for many scholars. It attempts to go further than this,
however, by providing a set of facilities allowing its user to integrate these
initial notes into a representation of an evolving personal interpretation --
perhaps one of the key goals of scholarly research.

Version 1.1.0 of Pliny is now available for the Macintosh
and Windows machine, or as a set of Eclipse plugins. There are a number of new
features -- including a new title search mechanism in the Resource Explorer,
some enhancements for setting the types of Pliny reference objects more easily,
support for more image-PDF document types (due to the upgrade to a new version
of the JPedal PDF viewer), a performance speedup due to some internal
restructuring, and several other new features. (October 2009)

Pliny was one of the projects awarded some funding from
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation MATC
2008 competition! The money has made it possible to explore some of what I call Pliny's second agenda. To see what that is and what was done, please visit the site
of Pliny's subproject on the Pliny Workspace, and WordHoard.
I'd like to thank the Mellon Foundation for
running the MATC competition, and the judges who found Pliny interesting
enough to allot it some funds! (December 2008)

Building Tools on Pliny

Although Pliny is a tool that could be useful in itself, it
also represents a model of how computing tools could be built for the
humanities. It uses the plugin model proposed and developed for Eclipse that
allows independant tool developers to construct tools that can interact with
each other in sophisticated ways. I believe that this model, although of course
not proposed originally with the humanities computing tool builder in mind,
provides some significant benefits both for the tool builder and tool user. The
page Building Tools on Pliny talks a little
more about this in terms suitable for a software developer, and provides
references to facilities to help a programmer get started doing this.

Acknowledgements

Pliny's development has been made possible by the provision
of leave time for me in the academic year 2005-6 so that I could focus on
Pliny's development. I am much indebted to Harold Short (director of CCH) and
King's College London (KCL) for making this possible. Furthermore, in 2008 the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded KCL one of its
MATC awards to Pliny. The money
provided made it possible for more work to be done on Pliny. I wish
to thank the Mellon Foundation for making this possible.

John Bradley
Center for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London